Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Confiscationism, Elizabeth Warren Style

Senator Warren's version of Confiscationism is probably best
paraphrased in the following well known quote:

"There is nobody in this country who
got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there?
Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to
market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest
of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police
forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for...Now look, you built a
factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God
bless! Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social
contract is that you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who
comes along."

These ideas are so strange it's hard to
believe that anyone could possibly give them any credence whatsoever, but stuff
like this is red meat to Confiscationists. Let’s break down the argument
and try to make sense of it.

“You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid
for.”

This is true but trivial.
Even if you knew that your tax dollars, specifically, went to build this
particular road (which is something you cannot ever possibly know) then, if you
want to claim that this entitles you to take partial credit for the success of
my factory, then it would seem that you have to take responsibility for everything
else that ever happens on this road as well.

For instance, let’s say that a crazed mass killer with an assault
rifle drives on this very same road to a mall, or a school, and shoots 25
people dead. By Senator Warren’s logic
the taxpayers who paid for this road must be held partially responsible for
these shootings. How can it be
otherwise? Do we get to pick and choose
what events of this road we want to accept credit (or blame) for? Let’s say there is a fifty car pile up on
this road – are the taxpayers to be held responsible?

Let’s briefly ponder something else that’s implied by the remark,
which is that you know with specificity which public projects your personal tax
dollars are going to. What if you did
know such a thing? Anyone who has ever
donated to a private charity for children, or even animals, knows that every
month you get a little progress report on how your money helped that kid or
that dog. Suppose you got a report in
the mail every month “This is John. Your
tax dollars are being used to pay for his food stamps,” etc., etc. This is nonsense, yet it is a perfectly
reasonable consequence of Senator Warren’s remarks.

“You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate.” Really?
Is it like, a truckload of workers was dropped on your doorstep and you
just blindly hired them without interviewing them, talking to them, checking
their backgrounds, verifying their references, training them and nurturing them
along in your company once you hired them, sending them to training courses to
upgrade their skills, teaching them the business, mentoring them, etc. How many of you out there think Senator
Warren has ever managed a team, a staff, or a portion of the workforce? Raise your hands.

“You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire
forces that the rest of us paid for…”
Again, this is true but trivially true. It’s true in the way that saying
“Cotton candy is food,” is true. The
fact is that the police and fire departments would be there if my factory never
even came into being, indeed, if I myself had never been born. Additionally, most factories are going to
have their own private security forces and individuals known as Fire Safety
Directors, and sophisticated fire safety equipment, that are not paid for by
public money.

Finally, we might observe that Senator Warren writes as though the
factory owner himself or herself is not paying any taxes when it’s a good bet
that, being a successful business person with a factory, they’re paying quite a
bit in taxes themselves.

Senator Warren’s version of Confiscationism is, like all
Libscreech, an attempt to present the visceral, emotional acceptance of
sympathy based ethics as a rational, logical and reasoned argument.